Dragon Quest Retrospective: Dragon Quest IV

 

With three successful RPGs under their belt – including one that would go down in history as one of the greatest of all time – the developers at Chunsoft and Enix immediately began to work on Dragon Quest IV. But rather than set the game in the same world as their ambitious trilogy, this new entry in the series would feature a brand new world to explore. Gone were the various trappings and traditions of the Erdrick trilogy and in its place was… Zenithia.

In an innovative first for the series and perhaps for gaming in general, Dragon Quest IV is divided into chapters, five in total. A sixth chapter was added at the end of the game when it was remade for the PlayStation and then also included in the DS version, and is an epilogue of sorts that serves as a bit of fanservice and redemption, but I will get to that later. First things first in games such as this, players get to name their character and like the previous game, pick their gender as well. Given the pronoun problem in the town of Aliahan in Dragon Quest III, I figured I’d try it again. The hero of Dragon Quest IV is now a female named Sara, and thus chapter one begins…

 

Chapter 1

…with a character that is neither female, nor Sara. Fortunately for everyone involved, this is not a case of the game taking the unprecedented route of making even your name a “but thou must” choice where the correct answer is “Ragnar” and this also isn’t the case where you spend an hour creating a character in a character creation menu that is actually pretty well designed for the PS3 era and then discover that you’ve created a background observer character who sits and watches all the cutscenes and doesn’t participate in the story at all.

This is also likely the first time in over a decade that you’ve even thought about White Knight Chronicles. You’re welcome.

Instead, Dragon Quest IV‘s first four chapters are like a prologue to the main story of chapter five and help set up the quest that Sara is soon to find herself in. Here in chapter one, we meet Ragnar, a soldier in the kingdom of Burland, and who is tasked with finding some missing children. At first this doesn’t seem like it pertains to the overall narrative of the game, but if there’s something the series is good at, it’s tying every little detail together and making even the most minor aspects of the plot turn out to be incredibly important. Dragon Quest IV is where this greater focus on narrative began.

What’s great about the way the game tells its story is that it’s a very slow build-up to the important stuff. Ragnar’s main focus for the three and a half hours we spend with him is to save the children of Izmit and nothing more. It’s here we see how dedicated he is to his job, although admittedly that’s only because we’re the ones controlling him. But given that there are very little distractions in this chapter of the game, there’s only really one thing for Ragnar to do and that’s to fulfill his duty and complete the rescue mission.

The journey of Ragnar is very well designed with an eye for both gameplay balance and serving as the game’s tutorial level. At no point during the initial trip north do I feel like I need to grind for experience in order to survive – there are two Medicinal Herbs available to players who want to explore a little – and by the time Ragnar arrives in the village of Izmit, he can afford to buy the best helmet available to him and increases his defense a good deal as a result. However, he can’t seem to find the information he’s looking for to trip the next event flag, so this is where the game’s night/day system shines. The game forces players to take advantage of this cycle by only making available at night the key information that the player likely has already figured out, that a man who went missing from Burland named Alex is the man in jail in Izmit. The player must then go back to Burland and let Flora know what happened, then go back to Izmit and while he is doing this, Ragnar earns enough money for even more equipment.

Admittedly this can sometimes be annoying when playing a game. Figuring out the puzzle isn’t enough, you also have to figure out how the game wants you to figure out the puzzle, for then and only then will the game allow you to continue. Enix must’ve had more faith in the North American audience than they did for Dragon Quest III, since the manual doesn’t come with a full walkthrough, or even a partial one. Players are left to figure this one out for themselves. It’s not that rough, there are basically only two locations to go at this point in the game, and if players can’t figure out how to trigger the flag to allow Ragnar to let Flora know what happened to her husband, this might not be the game for them.

The game supplies the player, if they know where to look, with enough free Medicinal Herbs to carry Ragnar through just long enough to meet up with Healie, upon which the slime will carry them the rest of the way through the first chapter. That said, the player also learns the hard way to buy gear in incremental upgrades. This is the tutorial level, after all. If the player doesn’t at least buy something a bit better than a helmet, which is the cheapest piece of gear to upgrade to the maximum in chapter one, they’ll likely die before they can find Healie and thus they lose half their gold. Multiple times if they’re really unlucky.

Healie is also a good demonstration for the game’s AI system, as well as a preview for what chapter five is going to be like. Being as he’s your only healer during chapter one, you’re basically forced to trust him to keep you healthy. In chapter five, everyone you meet during the first four chapters will become your party, but you won’t be able to control them. An AI is programmed to take the wheel here, and the same AI is controlling Healie. Later versions would allow for players to control their AI party members in chapter five if they chose, but in the original NES version, a rudimentary AI was created which somehow is still a lot better than some of the AI present in games today. The fight that automatically plays out in Dragon Quest III between Ortega and the King Hydra feels like a precursor to this. In chapter five, it could possibly have been meant as a way to streamline the battle system somewhat, since the player only has to input the commands for one character now instead of four.

Granted, the AI isn’t perfect. It seems to be programmed to only heal when characters dip below a certain threshold and some players might feel a little squeamish about it, especially since there once again doesn’t seem to be a correlation between Agility and turn order. Sara might be able to go first or might end up going last, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Players can issue orders to their party, but if one member has enough MP to continue going all out and another has run out, it can be a tough choice what to suggest, since individual AI can’t be selected, just the whole party’s.

The AI combat system was actually the very first thing the developers worked on before they came up with anything else, and once they came up with something workable, they ended up spending a year perfecting it. Although I prefer to manually control characters myself, the overall usefulness of the AI shows that a lot of care and attention went into making sure that the player would feel like the AI was a help rather than a burden. It sometimes feels like the AI is also allowed to cheat a little. Healie would often drop down to single digit health, and sometimes 1 HP before healing, but would heal immediately during that turn. Even though a player-controlled character would never be that reckless, it almost always seemed to work out for Healie, as if Healie was somehow able to cheat and see a few turns ahead, looking at the RNG seed to determine what the enemies were going to do and for how much damage, and what the expected outcome of Ragnar’s action would be, and so on.

Given that the game will contrive reasons that money doesn’t carry over from one chapter to the next – I presume the developers could only store one value for gold pieces in the entire game and couldn’t figure out a way to save that total for Ragnar – it’s not worth just not buying the best sword in the chapter and brute forcing your way to the Sword of Malice found in the tower west of Izmit. Ragnar will have enough space in his inventory to hold the Iron Spear and the Sword of Malice, as well as the rest of his equipped gear and maybe some more pieces of gear if you wish to sell them for some extra gold once you get Ragnar back in chapter five. It’s a good way of retaining some of the extra gold picked up in the tower once the best weapons and armour are all purchased.

One of my favourite aspects of the chapter is that the theme you hear while searching the tower for the missing children is one of my top five dungeon themes of all time. In the tower theme and the soundtrack in general, you can definitely hear the heavy influences that classical music has had on Koichi Sugiyama’s compositions for the Dragon Quest series, and while Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy soundtracks are also influenced somewhat by classical music, his soundtracks tend to have a bit more of a modern feel to them. If Koichi Sugiyama is Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Franz Liszt, then Nobuo Uematsu is Claude Debussy and the film composers of the latter half of the 20th century like John Williams and Hans Zimmer.

It’s a good thing that Healie is there in the tower with Ragnar because unlike most starting characters in the series, Ragnar comes with no spells at all. Ragnar is a Warrior, so he is bereft of anything to help him out other than his HP pool and defense, and early game enemies just don’t drop Medicinal Herbs at all. Other games in the series would be a bit more generous with the herbs, but this game maintains a really low item drop rate throughout, with the sole exception of chapter three. Even with that exception, it can feel like items just don’t drop as often as they should.

Anyway, after a three hour quest to rescue missing children, Ragnar discovers there’s a greater threat in the world. He hears about the Ruler of Evil and decides to set out on a quest to find the Hero that is destined to defeat the Ruler, the Hero whom was the true target of the evil plot he foiled. Upon talking to the king of Burland, the king awards him several thousand points of experience, which will bring him up to roughly where the other characters in the game will be at the end of their chapters, since before we shift focus to the Hero…

 

Chapter 2

…we must instead shift focus to a group of heroes from the Kingdom of Santeem. In an interview, the developers of Dragon Quest IV stated that what they wanted to do was to emulate the way the series gradually became more complex over time. Thus, the first chapter was sort of like the first game in the series, mainly a single player campaign, although they also wanted Ragnar to be purely a fighter with no spells, so they gave him a healing slime as a compromise. Chapter two followed the second game‘s lead by featuring a party of three.

Princess Alena is a tomboy character who is sick and tired of being cooped up in her castle all day and along with her loyal followers Cristo and Brey, she sneaks out of the castle to seek adventure. Players of Dragon Quest II will already notice that Chunsoft seems to have learned their lesson about balancing a party, for Cristo is a much improved Prince of Cannock who doesn’t die all the time. In fact, his strength is easily comparable to Alena, who is meant to be the Prince of Midenhall in this scenario. The Princess of Moonbrooke is here represented by Brey, who is still strictly a spell fighter. Even with a good weapon equipped, he can only do a small handful of points of damage per turn and must rely on his spells to get by.

It’s a good thing he gets Snowstorm during this chapter, although it does show up rather late. Up until then, a group of four or more enemies feels like a chore, but once Brey earns his area of effect spell, the gloves come off. But as is often the case, I am getting ahead of myself.

Chapter two begins with Alena being treated like a daughter in a Disney sequel. Have you noticed how over-protective their parents are? Ariel and Eric destroyed a sea witch, but when Ursula’s skinny nothing of a sister shows up, they’re running away and hiding and trying to hide their eventual daughter from the dangers of the sea. Kiara has paths marked out for her to play on and her uncles Timon and Pumbaa always follow her to make sure she’s okay. Even when the main couple from the original has a son, that son is still coddled and protected, like Scamp is.

The worry is that if Alena, their delicate flower of a princess, were to leave the castle, she might fall into evil hands. An NPC even says so. But if they knew that Alena took after the Martial Artist class, they might not have worried. Alena tends to rush into things without thinking, and if she were a video game catch phrase, it would be “leap before you think” from Okami. Cristo and Brey are basically along for the ride, although Cristo is always begging Alena to slow down and be more careful. You can really see this dynamic in play in her appearance in the Dragon Quest Heroes games.

Her main motivation in this chapter is to go out into the world and test her strength in order to become stronger. Near the end of the chapter, she hears about a tournament in Endor and because this is right up her alley, she decides to register. There’s a mysterious opponent working his way through the tournament named Psaro the Manslayer and this sounds like the perfect opponent to test her strength on. However, Alena doesn’t get the chance to fight him, for he disappears mysteriously before she can face him.

It’s a good thing, too, since the final battle of the tournament that players get to participate in is rather bullshit. Linguar can split himself into four and it’s completely luck based if you’re able to find which version of him is the real one in order to do damage to him. He goes down in two to three hits, but getting those two to three hits off is so hard to do, on average you’ll be taking about ten to twelve turns in battle. If you’re really unlucky, it’ll be a lot more than that, and Alena only has so much room for Medicinal Herbs in her inventory.

Also, these are one on one fights, which limits Alena just as much as it limits Ragnar, so she’ll need to buy a supply of Medicinal Herbs in order to survive since she doesn’t have a heal slime to fall back on. This feels like something which all new players learn the hard way, but veteran players are typically more than prepared for.

But Alena’s initial quest would be short lived. Her father has had awful dreams and after telling her of them, about a monster coming from the “Evil World” (Nadiria in later translations) to destroy everything, all the citizens of Santeem Castle vanish as if the Ruler of Evil is getting revenge for the king’s blabbing. It doesn’t prevent knowledge of the Evil World from spreading, and Alena vows to find a way to save her kingdom.

During this chapter, we visit Endor for the first time and we meet some characters who offer a little bit of foreshadowing. There’s a shop for sale, for example, and this is going to factor into the next chapter. We also get to visit the casino for the first time and do a little bit of gambling. What with gold being reset at the start of each new chapter, you might as well spend all your money buying tokens at the casino in order to prevent it from disappearing. You can’t turn it back into coins, but it at least gives players a little bit of a head start if they want to eventually pick up one or more of the prizes because it turns out that even though gold coins don’t carry over from one character to the next, the game doesn’t prevent casino tokens carrying over from one character to the next. Torneko in chapter three will find that he already has a bunch of casino tokens with his name on them despite the casino being closed for most of his chapter, and when Sara finally makes her way to Endor, she’ll have access to the same tokens, too. Maybe casino workers know something about heroes that the rest of us do not.

Speaking of Torneko…

 

Chapter 3

If the first two chapters are familiar ground for players to tread upon, the game veers off in a totally different direction in the next chapter. Perhaps no game before Dragon Quest IV has ever dared to have the player work at a shop. If you play games to escape from your experiences in retail hell working for bosses who disrespect you at every turn, do not play this one. Or actually, perhaps you should play it, for reasons that will become clear very soon.

We join merchant Torneko Taloon – he was originally called Torneko in the Japanese version, had his name changed to Taloon in the English version and eventually a compromise was reached where both names were deemed correct – as his wife is helping him get ready for work. There are various optional things to do around town, but the main thrust of the chapter’s beginning is that Torneko goes and clerks at a weapon store. The best thing about this chapter is that the Merchant class has already shown up in the series as one of the classes available to the player in Dragon Quest III. This game draws the logical conclusion in that, when the Merchant is not out on a quest to destroy great evil, he is likely buying and selling, wheeling and dealing, and his ultimate goal is to own his own shop. This has basically become a capitalism simulator.

Torneko’s boss has some surly words for him when he arrives and it’s likely this is to help the player sympathize with Torneko’s goal to find his own fortune away from the village of Lakanaba. An asshole shop owner is certainly nothing new, and we’re certainly supposed to think that he’s an asshole during Torneko’s chapter, but after that first encounter, his boss is shown treating him fairly, leaving him to do his job without micromanaging him and at the end of the day, paying him what he’s owed. He has more to do with, say, the owner of an independent company like a produce stand or a small town electronics store than he does the owner of a store that’s part of some national franchise. His boss never tells him that he’s forbidden to find his fortune elsewhere, nor is he forced to quit for arbitrary reasons even after following the rules set out for him. The rules also aren’t changed behind his back in order to screw him over. He never has the rug pulled out from under him at the last minute regarding time off, forcing him to cancel plans that are already set in stone if he still wants a job; technically, due to how the game is set up, he doesn’t even have to show up for work for several weeks and he still has a job when he gets back. If not for Torneko’s ultimate capitalist dream, it’s likely he would’ve been happy to live in Lakanaba forever, working for this weapon store.

One of the biggest problems that most games don’t bother to address is how the economy is supposed to work. It’s always been assumed that equipment and item shops are there for the chosen hero of light to shop at and no one else. RPG fans always joke that enemies carry little purses that they drop when they die. Some games have played around with this formula and have even tried to come up with an in game explanation of what’s going on. The Lufia series shows the main character collecting a bounty for enemies destroyed, but then the question becomes, where does that money come from? It has to be generated from somewhere, and one would think that a place that issues bounties like that would have to still have a monthly budget and an income of some sort.

The biggest mystery in RPGs is how the main characters can acquire big bags of money during their travels, seemingly out of thin air as they defeat enemies, and it doesn’t cause the world’s economy to crash from hyper-inflation. Up until now, I have finished Dragon Quest with 62100 gold pieces, Dragon Quest II with the maximum possible in that game (65535) and – thanks to the invention of banks – Dragon Quest III with 171394. Granted, the Dragon Quest universe typically keeps its numbers small, and in the first three games, the most expensive items available in shops cost nearly all of the gold that you are allowed to carry at any one time. Inflation should still ruin the economy of a Dragon Quest game if enough gold materializes in the world, but no matter how many gold pieces a player has, a Medicinal Herb will still only cost 8 of them, whether it’s being sold in the starting village or at a shop close to the penultimate dungeon.

The Final Fantasy series‘ numbers are typically much bigger. In the first game, I finished with the maximum possible (999999) gil, Final Fantasy II with 2527688 gil and an extra 672976 in Soul of Rebirth, and 1854770 gil in Final Fantasy III, and that’s so far during this retrospective. The numbers from here are bound to get bigger. It’s very easy to become a millionaire in this series, and aside from a secret shop in some of the early games where you can spend your entire largesse, you’ll eventually find yourself earning far more than you can ever spend, and yet gil does not inflate either.

Dragon Quest IV does not set out to explain any of this. Instead, by showing us several days in the life of a weapon store clerk, we see that the financial world does indeed revolve without the hero around to see it. Weapons are purchased by ordinary people, none of which will ever try to save the world, but all of which presumably need to defend themselves on their way to the next town. We do in fact find out that heroes aren’t the only ones spending gold, and we see Torneko working at a job and getting paid on commission from the profits earned.

An interesting secret about the weapon shop is that very rarely, a customer will come in with a sword called the Sword of Destruction in the NES version and the Cautery Sword in the DS version. This is the best weapon that Torneko can get during his chapter, but it’s not really necessary to proceed with one. It also turns up so rarely that by the time someone does sell the sword to the shop, Torneko may be able to afford to buy it himself. That said, I worked at the shop for two real world hours and didn’t see a single Sword of Destruction, so I didn’t bother waiting around for it. I had more than enough money for everything else anyway, including the second-best sword that can be sold to the shop.

But working at a weapons shop does not move the story forward no matter how long you do it. Well, it is possible to slowly and gradually earn enough money to meet some of the requirements of the story through working at the shop, but it would take quite a while. Instead, Torneko is supposed to earn enough money to afford some gear and set off on his own into the world. The best armour in the village and a decent weapon will allow him to survive the cave to the north. While optional, the cave contains the Iron Safe which nullifies the penalty that dying brings in this chapter only, so Torneko doesn’t lose half of his gold if the journey doesn’t go well. The downside is that it takes away one of Torneko’s eight item slots, and being fully geared takes up four. That and the fact that his chapter is another solo chapter, Torneko only has three item slots to work with.

The best bet for anyone feeling the pinch of the NES’s limits is to forego the starting helmet, which only affords two extra points of defense, and possibly forget about the safe as well, depending on how strong the enemies are and whether or not players feel safe trying to grind for money in a chapter where substantial amounts of it are needed and dying can set you back at least a half an hour. That said, a Wooden Hat is among the loot you can receive from an enemy and it gives Torneko six points of defense, so it could be good to hold out for one of those.

This is where the DS version shines. In it, players have a bag that they’re carrying around in each chapter, an invention that we have the SNES to thank. One could argue that by the time of Dragon Quest IV, they could’ve offered a bag of extra holding to players and had enough space on the cartridge to make it a moderately-sized bag, but the developers likely just didn’t want to. It wasn’t until the sixth Dragon Quest that one finally appeared in the series, probably thanks to brand new series developer Heartbeat.

That said, if there truly wasn’t enough room in the cartridge for it, it would explain why gold doesn’t carry over between chapters.

Chapters with multiple characters, as well as the final chapter, ease the inventory burden somewhat.

Chapter three doesn’t offer much to continue the plot of the game, and at first glance, only seems to exist to introduce another character, one which doesn’t have any motivation beyond capitalism. Torneko is pretty much the American of the game. (His intended nationality is actually Irish.) What chapter three does have is one of the best dungeons to grace the NES. The Silver Statue is a valuable item that Torneko can find which is worth a lot of money and will afford him the ability to open his own shop, and can be found within a dungeon full of water. The only way to get around this dungeon is by using a boat that’s conveniently located within. There are treasure chests on one floor that are blocked by water, and on the floor below, there are treasure chests that are held high enough above the ground that Torneko can’t climb up to grab them. However, there’s a button he can press that will let out the water from above in order to fill up the floor below. This allows Torneko to not only access the treasure chests on the upper floor, but sail around to all the treasure chests on the lower floor, too.

Unfortunately, after clearing this dungeon and buying his shop, the biggest grind begins. The Statue can be sold for enough money, combined with what Torneko has more than likely earned thus far, to buy the shop he’s always dreamed of having, but then in order to finish a tunnel meant to lead out to the rest of the world, he needs a lot more gold and in order to earn that gold, he needs to find more weapons. And in the absence of any more dungeons to explore and treasure to find, the best he can hope for is to receive weapon and armour drops from enemies and sell them in his shop. On the DS, he can just keep going until his HP runs out, but on the NES, he has such a limited inventory that, if he’s fully equipped and has the Iron Safe to protect his money, he can only bring back three pieces of equipment at a time. The best bet would seem to be three Broad Swords, but every little bit helps. It certainly hurts to throw out equipment or items that are of low value when a better one comes along, but sometimes it’s necessary. These weapons also drop only sporadically, so it can sometimes feel like it takes longer than is really necessary to farm for the gold needed to finish off the chapter. But that said, chapter three is approximately the same length as chapter two, it just feels longer since not a lot really happens.

This grind is also where most of Torneko’s experience points come from, for up until he sets off to find weapons for his shop, he’ll still be at a relatively low level compared to the protagonists of the first two chapters. Also, as he earns levels and becomes stronger, he will be powerful enough to handle things on his own. At one point, Torneko can hire extra help if he wants to, but he can also level up enough that he no longer needs that help.

The weapons and armour he brings back are then put up for sale and his wife, working at his shop, mentions being able to bring in a specific amount for each piece. That amount is double what you can get if you were to just sell them to a shop regularly. In fact, the chapter in general gives some great examples of how the economy in a Dragon Quest game typically works. It also helps explain, if you were clueless about it, why GameStop always offers a lot less than you paid for a game when you’re trading it back to the shop, but will then turn around and sell that used copy for only $3 less than a new copy.

Most games show that when selling a weapon or piece of armour back to the shop, you only receive a fraction of the price back. This may be to prevent players from just stockpiling money as items, or it could be to prevent reckless spending, since buying that sword you don’t need for no reason will ultimately reduce your wealth once you sell it again. Here, we see how one item shop runs its business and how it helps power the economy of the town of Lakanaba.

Instead of hourly and daily wages, when Torneko works for the shop in Lakanaba, he gets paid on commission. Those who live in the real world know that being paid by commission is a very poor way to run a business if sales are on a downward swing, but for a game where there’s apparently always a need for weapons (the local wildlife are very aggressive), a shop like Torneko’s will always have customers. The game also doesn’t penalize you for having a string of customers who either don’t buy anything or sell something to the store, for the minigame continues until a hundred gold pieces can be paid out to Torneko. It’s like those survey sites that pay out once you reach a certain amount of income.

Torneko’s commission is 6% of the full retail price of the item, and he always offers to buy something at about 75% of its retail price. The profit margin for the store is 19%, so for every 100 gold pieces Torneko earns, the shop earns a little over 300 gold pieces and brings in almost 10000 gold pieces a month. I don’t know what rent is in Lakanaba, but the shop must be successful enough that it can have employees working for it. Most shops you see in the series will have a bed located in the back so that it presumably doubles as both a home and a business, so presumably rent isn’t as fair as you’d think it would be, but this is just speculation.

Also, that 6% is approximate. Because each item has a set commission value it adds to the total pool, the Club will always be worth one gold piece. Even though it’s actually supposed to be worth 1.8, the game rounds down. Selling five of them will not yield nine gold pieces, it’ll only yield five. It does sort of feel like the store is scamming Torneko on Club sales, and thanks to the presence of Clubs in the game, his commission can vary from one day to the next. It’ll still generally stay above 5%, but it’s able to go as low as 3.3% if everyone suddenly decides they only want to buy Clubs. The day will somehow not end until Torneko earns his 100 gold coins, but that will be a really, really long day.

When finally Torneko has saved up enough money to complete the tunnel east of Endor, the chapter ends with him venturing out into the rest of the world to continue his life’s work. It’s an interesting experiment of a chapter and aside from the final portion of the quest line, it plays out pretty well. What’s interesting is that no one would really try this sort of thing again until Recettear was released in 2007. Somewhere out there in the multiverse is a timeline where a developer known as Gust created an entire series of shop-based RPGs that took inspiration from Dragon Quest IV and began either late in the SNES era or early in the PlayStation era and is pretty much their timeline’s version of the Atelier series.

Apparently you can either have a yearly crafting RPG series or a yearly shop-based RPG series but not both.

 

Chapter 4

In this, the final of the quartet of introduction chapters, we meet Mara and Nara, a pair of entertainers in the town of Monbaraba. Their official class names are Dancer and Fortuneteller, but these are just fancy ways of saying the game just wanted a female Brey and Cristo. The game also wanted to give them a male Alena even if this character wasn’t meant to join Sara to save the world, so an NPC named Orin joins them partway through the chapter and eases the burden of being squishy wizards somewhat.

The sisters are driven by a desire for revenge, for their father was murdered prior to the start of the game by an evil man named Balzack.

…yes, this game features a boss whose name can be pronounced like “ballsack.” I want to believe that the game isn’t juvenile on purpose. The name Balzack has its origins in French, and your testicles in French translate to “couille,” which is a word that sounds nothing like “ballsack.”

It is Mara and Nara who require the most coddling during these first four chapters, considering how little HP they have, as well as an overall weak gear set until very late in the game. Their quest for revenge takes about four hours, but it feels like it could’ve taken less if they’d been a bit stronger.

Throughout their journey, they hear about the kingdom of Keeleon experiencing a coup, with a new king taking the place of the old, one who is performing experiments on young women. It’s up to Mara and Nara to put a stop to this and in the process, avenge their father. The new king of Keeleon happens to be named Balzack and is experimenting with something called the Secret of Evolution, something which alchemists can apparently manipulate.

Between Dragon Quest IV, fundamental Christians, the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Threshold” and the Pokémon franchise, I really get the feeling that nobody actually understands evolution.

During this chapter, Mara and Nara visit Aktemto Mine in order to retrieve some gunpowder that they need as part of their quest, but the mine is already in rough shape. People are dying there, yet there are people utterly convinced that they’re going to become filthy rich if they just keep digging a little further. Just a little further. There’s bound to be something amazing just a little bit further down the mine.

Yes, I am deliberately invoking ironic foreshadowing here.

Even with all the preparation before facing their sworn enemy, what’s notable about the sisters’ quest is that they fail. They don’t manage to get revenge on their father’s killer and instead find themselves having to flee their home country in order to seek out help. The chapter ends with them arriving in Endor, and along the way they hear about a merchant named Torneko who has opened a shop.

It’s little clues like that which make it sound like these four chapters are occurring at the same time, rather than happening in chronological order, one after another. This notion that the various different events of the game are all happening to different characters at the same time is something which most games generally shy away from. Rudra no Hihou tried it on the SNES and was mildly successful, and Final Fantasy VI incorporated it in a couple of limited ways. Since then, it’s occasionally been used as a narrative device by games like Breath of Fire IV, Final Fantasy IX and Final Fantasy XIII to allow for multiple groups of characters to do things that contribute to the story and games like Birth By Sleep and Dream Drop Distance, both in the Kingdom Hearts series, to give players more than one playable character to control. It’s otherwise very rare in gaming, and even games with as large a playable cast as Final Fantasy IV don’t switch between its heroes and will instead usually continue to focus on one main character throughout the entire game, with everyone else acting as supporting cast.

 

Chapter 5

This is the chapter where it all comes together. Everything that happens in the first four chapters, over the course of approximately twenty hours of gameplay, are all to set up the heroic tale of Sara, the girl from a hidden village in the mountains who sets out to save the world.

But first, she needs motivation, so her hometown is attacked by the servants of Necrosaro, whom you might remember as Psaro the Manslayer, the mysterious man who disappeared from the tournament in Endor. Now we know where he went. As Sara’s being led to safety and hid, it’s hastily explained to her that she was adopted and was being trained to be the great Hero spoken of in legend, but that she’s not quite ready and if she’d just been able to stay hidden a little while longer (presumably until her eighteenth birthday, past experience would suggest), she would’ve been able to go and save the world. Her best friend has the power to change her appearance and she disguises herself in order to fool Necrosaro’s servants. Sara’s friend sacrifices herself to keep Sara safe and when the fighting is over and Necrosaro packs up and heads back to his lair in triumph, he’s basically not only destroyed everyone in the village, he’s salted the earth behind him as a final punishment to the land that housed his enemy. The ground is poison and the buildings are all destroyed and Sara, sullen and inconsolable, wanders off into the world with nothing more than a basic weapon and the clothes on her back. Not even her identity is left intact, as she has been left without even a true mother or father to mourn for.

Chapter five is where we learn the consequences of Torneko’s actions in chapter three. The cave he opened up is Sara’s ticket to Endor, but because Torneko reconnected these two parts of the world, the monsters from the Evil World are out for his blood in revenge. They seem to really like their revenge.

It appears that the plan of the Ruler of Evil has been to divide the human world up into smaller pieces and make it that much harder to navigate around. Forbidding ships to sail, destroying bridges (this one wasn’t pinned on them but it would fit their MO), even collapsing tunnels between continents, the people of this world have been isolated as best the monsters have been able to do, in order to prevent them from banding together and defending themselves. It takes the efforts of several heroes to undo all of this damage. At one point during this chapter, monsters even take over a lighthouse and shine an evil light that sinks ships. As opposed to previous games in the series where we only hear about how evil someone is and that we must defeat them to restore peace to the world, these enemies have agency over their actions and they use this agency to try to rob humans of ours.

Apropos of nothing else, I like that there’s an enemy in the lighthouse that discovers that Torneko, whom he was trying to ambush, went back to the nearby town and chants Return to go there, only to hit his head on the ceiling and collapse in a heap. I wonder if he gets experience points for defeating himself. Truly, he was not one of Necrosaro’s higher quality allies.

Torneko’s tunnel is a necessity for Sara to move forward, or else enemies at this early stage in the game will quickly overwhelm her. The bad news is that her first allies she runs into in Endor are the weakest of the bunch. Mara and Nara don’t really improve much with Sara by their side, they’re still harder to generally keep alive. You can keep them alive if you work hard enough, but it seems like someone with high HP and high defense like Alena or Ragnar are much better party members to bring along if you need someone to tank a bunch of hits and keep the squishy wizards safe.

It gets worse, too. The first real dungeon in chapter five is one of those gimmick dungeons that punish players for not being strong enough by separating Sara from her new friends. Going in at level five is not the best idea unless somehow the player was able to carry over a bunch of weapons and armour from chapter four and can either equip that gear or sell it and buy the best gear available in Endor. Without it, players can be stuck grinding until Sara no longer dies solo to a couple of Liclicks.

Sara’s next ally is Torneko, who is arguably the weakest of the purely physical attackers, too. Sorry, Sara, but I promise things will get better.

Torneko is interesting in chapter five. Whereas in chapter four, he was a pure merchant (without the ability to find extra gold on the ground, though, that seems to have been dropped from the previous game), chapter five turns him into more of a Dragon Quest III style Goof-Off. I know he takes his job as a merchant very seriously, so I can only assume that his role as a Goof-Off is meant to convey that he’s living an overall easier-feeling lifestyle than the one that a Hero like Sara lives. Torneko’s motivation is to become the greatest arms merchant in the world, a motivation that, one would argue, goofing off is at odds with. I’d say that makes him somewhat of a gadabout, a wanderer. In fact, later translations would call the class Gadabout, which is a lot more accurate a way to describe Torneko than just a silly Goof-Off.

Torneko’s unpredictability beyond the general unpredictability of an AI-controlled system comes from his general move set. His value comes from the benefits his moves offer to the party. He can tell jokes and trip opponents and even occasionally steal valuable items. His success rate is a lot higher than it has any right to be. He’ll trip bosses or get entire groups of strong enemies to laugh and waste their turn. The biggest benefit he offers is that he’ll sometimes steal stat seeds from enemies. The action comes up not too often, but when it does, it’s a 100% success rate, and many Strength and Agility Seeds were stolen over the course of the game without even trying. Actually grinding for them would’ve likely earned many more.

The game’s AI isn’t perfect, unfortunately. Sometimes it’ll attack enemies that I would prefer to save until last. It’s also very annoying when it comes to attacking Metal Slimes, especially when those Metal Slimes are in a group with other enemies. It’s very hard to direct your allies to attempt to attack specific enemies, they’ll act in the way that they’ve been programmed to attack and sometimes that means they’ll attack the enemies that are easier to kill first and save the harder to kill ones for last. In the case of Metal Slimes, they’ll all escape before your allies will get around to attacking them, so your only hope is that they’re alone or only seen with other Metal Slimes and that one or two of them stick around for your group to attack.

Along the way, Sara acquires a wagon, a horse named Primrose and her owner, giving her another temporary party member to use. It’s a good thing she has the wagon, for when she eventually finds the characters from chapters one and two, she’ll really need it. The upside is that, for the first time in the series and the only time I’ve ever seen it done on the NES, characters who aren’t in your party will gain experience for coming along. The downside is that the wagon can’t go into most dungeons, so it has to stay behind. Unless you’re deliberately changing your party around as the situation calls for it, some characters will end up falling behind because of this. Late in the game, after killing a King Metal Slime, at least one character didn’t level up, whereas one of the characters who was lagging behind due to a lack of dungeon action actually earned two.

The problem with chapter five, in my opinion, is that it’s an old school Dragon Quest game. The first four chapters give us a good idea of who the characters are and what are their motivations. We got a general idea of their personalities and how they might react to any given situation. Chapter five, being from the point of view of the main silent protagonist, gives each character a tiny little bit longer to shine as they’re introduced to the party but then as soon as the character joins and the familiar music plays and a message reads “Character has joined the party,” their role in the story is done. There’s nothing left for them to do to further the plot. The story is once more just a series of keys the player must find to unlock the next part of the game. Once the player has all of the characters, their next goal becomes the acquisition of special gear that’s said to aid in the defeat of evil. But instead of belonging to Erdrick, this armour belongs to the Zenithians. It serves the same function, though, for only someone who is descended from the Zenithians can use this gear.

For a really good example of a spot in the game where a bit more effort could’ve been put into it, take the party’s confrontation with Balzack, now in charge of Santeem Castle. This should’ve been personal for not only Nara and Mara, for they’re on a quest of revenge against Balzack, but for Alena as well since this is her home that’s being defiled, her stolen kingdom being run by monsters. This should’ve been a very climactic scene for literally every female character in the game except Sara, but instead it happens with so little fanfare, you’d think Balzack was just a minor boss fight that happens to unlock the way to Gardenbur Castle. Balzack does live up to his end of the confrontation, taunting the daughters of Edgar for a moment before the battle begins, but we never find out what their reactions are.

If chapter five has a redeeming factor, it’s in its puzzles. My favourite has to be the one that leads players to the Sandglass of Regression, an optional item that reverses time in battles and allows for the player to more easily come back from mistakes without losing their party’s health and half of their gold upon revival. In the village of Seaside, players hear about the Stone of Drought, which they can infer its purpose from prior games. Players also hear about how the beach floods each night when the tide comes in. When resting at the inn overnight, players will notice that there’s one patch of beach where the tide doesn’t reach, almost like the village was designed in Minecraft and for some reason, there’s just a single block of dirt showing in the water.

It turns out that this block of land is where the Stone of Drought is, and all players need to do is search this block during the day, when the tide is out. The Stone of Drought can then be used to evaporate a waterfall located within a cave in order to access the items held within and continue the story.

I can’t help but wonder if the developers had something against feminism. Or women in general. Upon reaching Gardenbur Castle, the party hears about a precious treasure and then upon entering the room said treasure is kept in, they’re invited to check a drawer since something good’s apparently inside. This is the kind of thing that players are usually told early on in an adventure to get them used to checking for treasures in various containers or furniture, sort of like a tutorial level, but it’s a little suspicious if that tutorial level is coming after about thirty five hours and especially during chapter five. Ragnar should’ve been the one to be told to check a drawer for treasure, not Sara.

It doesn’t matter if the player checks the drawer or not. Even if the party tries to leave without taking the bait, the same woman who encourages them to check for treasure will scream for the guards because she’s being robbed! Next thing the party knows, they’re being thrown in jail for a crime they didn’t commit and then are being brought before the Queen, who questions them about the crime. They are basically railroaded into proving they didn’t do it by finding the real thief. Oh, and the Queen’s taking a hostage to guarantee the party’s compliance.

This was released in 1990, long before certain feminists encouraged people to believe women without proof, arguably a dangerous proposal, because if you don’t have to provide proof of a crime and can just accuse someone, you get Salem, Massachusetts all over again. It’s just too bad that the kind of men who gleefully point this out are also the kind of men with misogynist leanings in the first place, the kind who go on YouTube and deliberately pronounce the word “women” with incorrect vowel sounds. You’re sure showing them there, guys!

It does stick in my craw a little that I’m the one who has to prove my innocence without having already had guilt proven. Sorry, but you don’t get to accuse me of something without proof and then demand that I prove my innocence. That’s not how burden of proof works. I already get enough of that from people in real life who make false claims about vaccines and Covid-19 and then tell me a vague “the proof’s on the Internet, I’ve already done the research and I know it’s there, if you do the research, you’ll see it too.” As I said, that’s not how burden of proof works. I’d rather not have that happen in video games as well, but it happens more often than you’d think. Apparently in the woman-only kingdom of Gardenbur, a woman can submit an accusation of a crime without proof and it’s up to the accused to prove their innocence.

The one aspect of this scenario that doesn’t make me want to go and find an incel club to join is that I chose a woman as the main hero of the game, and clearly the justice system doesn’t have an anti-male bias if women are also being locked away without due process. This is more a fault with how the justice system in Gardenbur is being run rather than an inherent flaw in a kingdom with a bias towards women. In some ways, it almost feels like whoever came up with this scenario had something against women. In a couple of weeks, Cecil is going to visit a similar castle full of women, but they’re much more helpful and even offer their irreplaceable national treasure to him in order to help save the world. It is very interesting that Dragon Quest IV is the one with not only a warrior princess who is more than capable of getting into and out of trouble, as well as a pair of sisters questing for revenge, then has a scenario like the one in Gardenbur that makes me question what the developers’ real attitudes are towards the fairer sex.

That’s a tragedy, because Alena, Mara and Nara are three of the best female characters to have ever graced the NES, from a characterization standpoint. It took a little bit longer for Final Fantasy to start creating female characters that could stand alongside their male counterparts, but once they did, they went all in. There’s a point in Final Fantasy V where 75% of the party is female, and overall they make up 60% of the game’s entire playable cast. Final Fantasy X-2 was the first in the series to feature an all female playable cast, something which still hasn’t happened in Dragon Quest unless you count games where you can create your own party, like the third and ninth games, and given how the NPCs in the third game still used male-centric pronouns when talking to a female hero, I don’t think that game should count. The Final Fantasy XIII trilogy revolved largely around Lightning and her sister. I’d say Final Fantasy is a very progressive series when it comes to its representation of women. Dragon Quest… tries. However, neither Dragon Quest II nor Final Fantasy II did a very good job with their female party members.

Remember Aktemto Mine in chapter four? It turns out that something incredibly evil is buried beneath and is unearthed in this chapter. The result is one of my favourite set pieces in the entire game, the castle found underground where Estark is fought. The dungeon found within the world tree located within Elfville is a close second. The developers really knew how to stretch the graphical capabilities of the NES.

Having only one character capable of casting the Antidote spell is a pain in the ass, especially later on in the game when enemies breathe poison gas or can poison by touch and even with levels in the mid thirties, the characters seem unable to avoid getting poisoned. With inventory space as limited as it is, it’s too inconvenient to carry around more than a few Antidote Herbs at a time. The only alternatives are to run from every encounter that could possibly poison a character, try to bring Cristo with the party into every dungeon and risk him being killed due to low HP, or to just leave the dungeon every time a party member gets poisoned, so that Cristo can cast the Antidote spell then.

With that in mind, the penultimate dungeon, which allows the use of the wagon throughout, is a godsend since it’s long enough that your magic users are going to run out of magic unless they’re told to conserve it and you’ll have to cast Outside and Return to replenish your magic. An easier way through seems to be to put only physical party members in your main fighting group, since they have ample HP and can survive several hits, then heal up afterwards. There are three characters capable of healing the group and with that much of an MP pool, the way to the Evil World should be simple enough to work your way through. The best thing is that, unlike Dragon Quest II, the cave doesn’t contain any traps that aren’t immediately obvious to see, and just like Dragon Quest II, you can save at a shrine upon leaving.

In comparison, the trip through Necrosaro’s castle isn’t as long and if you have the proper item in your inventory, you can call your wagon once you’ve made your way through and are about to defeat the final boss for good. That way you can bring all eight party members into battle with him, and as I said before, that can be a godsend.

The Necrosaro fight begins in a purely physical manner, so my favourite method of fighting him is to start out with my purely physical fighters attacking him. As he loses his limbs and even his head, his physical attacks will weaken and soon he’s doing next to no damage and you’re doing pretty decent damage. He’ll begin to pull out the magical attacks partway through his transformation, at about the same time that his physical attacks start to do no more than one point of damage and then when he reaches his final form, he’ll begin sending out very powerful elemental attacks and by then his physical attacks are back to normal too. At that point, I like to swap out a physical combatant, maybe Alena because she has less HP and attack than Ragnar, for a mage, especially if they have the Bikill spell and can double Ragnar’s attack. It’s a very well designed fight, both visually and as a final boss fight, especially for the capabilities of the NES. Being able to show Necrosaro’s transformation due to using the Secret of Evolution on himself was great for its time.

 

Chapter 6 and End Credits

The biggest part of the narrative in Dragon Quest IV that I thought isn’t properly executed is the disappearance of everyone in Alena’s kingdom. They’re shown to have returned after the defeat of Necrosaro but it isn’t really revealed what happened to them or where they were. It’s assumed, therefore, that they must’ve disappeared somewhere. Or, knowing the series’ love for physical transformation as a problem that needs to be overcome (more on that in the fifth, seventh and eighth games), maybe everyone in the kingdom was turned into mice and they were all still there, but they were just all frightened and hiding in mouse holes.

The silent film style ending where the characters all travel back home together is otherwise a brilliant way to end the game. You can show Mara and Nara visiting their father’s grave and then their return to performing and you won’t have to read dialogue in order to figure out that they told their father that peace has returned to the world and that his murder has finally, truly been avenged. You didn’t have to have dialogue to show Taloon returning home and having a joyous reunion with his wife and an enthusiastic reunion with his son. Seeing flowers sprouting again in the main hero’s hometown as well as finding that her best friend managed to somehow survive the slaughter is a great way to end the game. Their hug says a lot (first same sex couple in gaming?), and then right before fading to credits, the entire party shows up as well as the wagon and Primrose the horse. Can’t forget Primrose.

However, the mystery of where Alena’s people went could’ve used a little bit of closure, even if it’s just the king saying that he went to sleep one day and then woke up and some time seems to have passed and the world feels like it’s at peace, then he asks Alena what happened and maybe we cut away because presumably she’d enthusiastically tell her father all about her travels to find the hero of legend and then about her journey with the hero to save the world, of the wicked Necrosaro and perhaps she might even ask that the king forgives Necrosaro for his actions and condemn instead the fiends from the underworld who twisted him and caused his descent to evil.

What’s interesting is that remakes of the game would include a sixth chapter where Psaro is prevented from becoming Necrosaro and then is willing to join the party and bring the fight to the true enemy of the game. Even though it directly contradicts the events of the end of chapter five and branches the timeline off into a new direction where even Psaro joins the heroes to save the world, the bonus chapter shows just how much of a fan favourite and sympathetic villain he turned out to be. He was perhaps the first actual villain in series history. Up to that point, he was easily better than at least two of the villains Final Fantasy had offered on the NES and would pave the way for villains with clear motivations and goals beyond being someone’s poorly written D&D-style obstacle to overcome. We get to see at various times in the game that Psaro actually goes and does stuff. We see the grim fate of his beloved elf, Rosa, whose tears turned into rubies and who therefore was the target of bullying and physical violence throughout her life until finally she was fatally wounded at the hands of greedy humans. This was probably one of, if not the first RPG to truly show the different sides of humanity. When Psaro wanted to destroy the world, he actually had a point. Humanity was garbage to him and he was going to take out the trash.

Psaro would eventually be included as a secret bonus playable character in Dragon Quest Heroes, too.

It’s likely that Pasro was one of the inspirations for one of the Breath of Fire series’ greatest antagonists, Fou-Lu. As much as we would like to believe in the inherent goodness in humanity and as much as most RPGs will show you that humanity is more than worth saving by having the species appear peaceful and good, games like Dragon Quest IV are great for showing that there are two sides to humanity. There are those who want to live peacefully and be one with the world and each other, and there are those who are selfish and don’t care if the world burns down around them. The humans who beat up Rosa for her ruby tears and ended up killing her didn’t realize how short sighted they were being until it was too late and they had to live with the consequences. Or rather, they probably managed to dodge responsibility and got saved by Sara and the gang when they defeated Necrosaro and they get to move forward with no lessons learned.

I guess sometimes assholes will manage to make it through life without having any shit stick to them.

Dragon Quest IV is a major step forward for the franchise and a giant leap away from the mythology of the first three games. In creating Zenithia, no one at Enix knew just how much influence it would have on the next two games, accidentally setting up an expectation that the series would always contain trilogies or at least, vaguely interconnected games. There are some who speculate that the worlds of the seventh, eighth and ninth games are somehow connected, but those games don’t feature any shared mythologies. The current franchise, as it was back in the early nineties at the end of the NES era, seems content to let each game develop naturally and publish them when they’re ready rather than force them out the door due to a feeling of obligation, and other than Dragon Quest II, it’s been serving the series well so far. The transition to the SNES is a big one for the franchise, although it does mark a slowing down in the production of new games. Although four games were released on the NES, only two would be released on the SNES and then only one on the PlayStation. (This does not count spin-off titles.)

That said, the popularity of the series continued to grow in Japan, whereas Final Fantasy was quickly finding its audience in America and its fourth entry was soon to be released…

 

Next week: to be announced, tomorrow…